Elizabeth Culmer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
edenfalling) wrote2015-12-31 07:11 pm
edenfalling) wrote2015-12-31 07:11 pm
Entry tags:
[Fic] "Of Ill Repute" -- Daredevil
Summary: Karen has a reputation again. (400 words)
[ETA: The slightly revised final version is now up on AO3!]
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Of Ill Repute
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The strangest part about moving to New York is that Karen magically becomes respectable again -- not because she's changed (mostly she hasn't, and the few but extremely important exceptions are years old by now) but because nobody here knows her. And so they take her at face value: a pretty young woman with an associate degree in accounting looking for an office job.
(Sealed records are beautiful things, she thinks. Especially once you're away from the people who already knew everything that's supposedly locked up and forgotten.)
She gets a job. That's easy, all things considered.
Then she works on getting a life. That's harder.
It turns out that once she gets to know people more than casually, they want to know more than casually in return. They want her to open up her shields and share what makes her tick.
And Karen... can't. Not without opening a hundred other doors she desperately wants to keep locked. So she has work friends she sometimes gets a drink with on Fridays, and some people she's met a handful of times at roller derby matches, and her upstairs neighbor who walks his dog at the same time Karen goes jogging before work and wants someone to nod along to his perennial complaints about the weather and the city council. But no real friends.
She doesn't have a reputation following her like an inky cloud anymore, but regaining her respectability isn't the same as starting over without scars.
She thinks, later, that if she'd had friends, she might not have paid enough attention to her work to spot the fishy transactions. If she'd had friends, she might not have gotten Daniel Fisher killed -- she might have been sure enough to take the data public right away. If she'd had friends, she might not have latched onto Ben so hard and fast and gotten him killed too.
She has a reputation again now, the residue of old disasters trailing behind her like smoke. Nobody wants to hire a whistleblower. Nobody wants to befriend a person so closely associated with so many deaths. Even Matt and Foggy would probably turn away if they knew she really was guilty of murder, or if they found out all the other secrets in her closet.
Karen looks down at her hands, scrubs away phantom blood and oil, and thinks, okay. She's trouble. She always has been. She always will be.
She can work with that.
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Inspired by the 10/11/15![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
15_minute_ficlets word #235: ill
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And now off to the G. family party!
[ETA: The slightly revised final version is now up on AO3!]
---------------------------------------------
Of Ill Repute
---------------------------------------------
The strangest part about moving to New York is that Karen magically becomes respectable again -- not because she's changed (mostly she hasn't, and the few but extremely important exceptions are years old by now) but because nobody here knows her. And so they take her at face value: a pretty young woman with an associate degree in accounting looking for an office job.
(Sealed records are beautiful things, she thinks. Especially once you're away from the people who already knew everything that's supposedly locked up and forgotten.)
She gets a job. That's easy, all things considered.
Then she works on getting a life. That's harder.
It turns out that once she gets to know people more than casually, they want to know more than casually in return. They want her to open up her shields and share what makes her tick.
And Karen... can't. Not without opening a hundred other doors she desperately wants to keep locked. So she has work friends she sometimes gets a drink with on Fridays, and some people she's met a handful of times at roller derby matches, and her upstairs neighbor who walks his dog at the same time Karen goes jogging before work and wants someone to nod along to his perennial complaints about the weather and the city council. But no real friends.
She doesn't have a reputation following her like an inky cloud anymore, but regaining her respectability isn't the same as starting over without scars.
She thinks, later, that if she'd had friends, she might not have paid enough attention to her work to spot the fishy transactions. If she'd had friends, she might not have gotten Daniel Fisher killed -- she might have been sure enough to take the data public right away. If she'd had friends, she might not have latched onto Ben so hard and fast and gotten him killed too.
She has a reputation again now, the residue of old disasters trailing behind her like smoke. Nobody wants to hire a whistleblower. Nobody wants to befriend a person so closely associated with so many deaths. Even Matt and Foggy would probably turn away if they knew she really was guilty of murder, or if they found out all the other secrets in her closet.
Karen looks down at her hands, scrubs away phantom blood and oil, and thinks, okay. She's trouble. She always has been. She always will be.
She can work with that.
---------------------------------------------
Inspired by the 10/11/15
15_minute_ficlets word #235: ill---------------------------------------------
And now off to the G. family party!
no subject
no subject
The big negative things from Karen's 616 history that I think are most likely to come up are her stint as a heroin addict who worked in pornography to buy drugs (which in the comics happened significantly after she met Matt and Foggy) and her father's, uh... let's go with 'legal woes and mental breakdown'. (Long story short, Dr. Page was a scientist who invented a new superweapon, refused to sell it or reveal its secrets to the US government, was tried for treason as a result (which I am pretty sure is not how treason even works), went crazy from radioactive side-effects of his own research, also got superpowers via radioactive side-effects, faked his own death, rode a skeletal horse (because by that point, why the hell not), and tried to kill Matt and Karen before briefly coming back to his senses and saving them at the cost of his own life. Silver Age comics were weird.)
I tend to go with some kind of drug problem, possibly with some related criminal activity given that Karen heavily implies she's shot at least one person before she kills Wesley. Family issues could certainly play into that, though -- the MCU military is not above highly unethical conduct, as seen in the Hulk movies, and the stress of unfair accusations against her father (not to mention him possibly going crazy and/or vanishing) could have been one thing leading her to try drugs as a coping method, and would also be fairly easy for Ben Urich to dig up and point out as a factor reducing Karen's public credibility as a source in the Union Allied investigation.